News of the Week (November 5th, 2017)

Gun Rights

Woman With A Gun Scares Off Four Would-Be Burglars
When four men tried to break into a woman’s home in Keithville, Louisiana, last Friday, she grabbed her gun and met them at the back door. The unidentified homeowner told police the four suspects fled when they caught sight of her handgun.

Forget gun control. Los Angeles goes for baseball bat control
Leave it to the City of Angels to stay ahead of the pack in coming up with new and inventive ideas. The City Fathers there are justifiably worried about violence flaring up during the various protests which seem to engulf the left coast every weekend. So what should they do about it? They’ve just made it illegal to go to a demonstration with a baseball bat. Oh, and they added fifteen more things to the list.

Oxygen-18 Stability in Foraminifera fossils, implications in paleoclimatology18O is a rare isotope of oxygen. The ratio of 18O to the normal 16O in foraminifera fossils (“forams”) can be used to estimate paleo-ocean temperatures. Higher values mean lower temperatures. A recent article on geologypage.com (here) led me to Bernard, et al., 2017, which has experimental data that suggest 18O concentrations can be altered in fossils by solid-state diffusion after fossilization. This can corrupt the measurement and the resulting calculated temperature. According to Bernard and colleagues, the 18O concentration alteration is visually imperceptible, so one cannot tell the fossil has been altered by visual inspection. If their results are valid, how will this impact our view of climate history?

Marxism: The Key to Health?
The Lancet is a once-respected medical journal that has been taken over by leftists, in a sad illustration of O’Sullivan’s Law. Its contents now alternate between respectable articles on technical medical subjects and leftist propaganda like this article, by the Lancet’s editor in chief, Richard Horton. Horton argues that Marxism represents the best path forward for medicine.

Shopping Medicare: The Movie
Co-blogger Bob V is trying something new, and we’re pleased as punch to introduce his first video on shopping for Medicare supplements. Pretty timely, too, seeing as how it’s Open Enrollment season.

War & Terror

Left Wing Oakland Radicals Worked With ISIS, New Book Reports
Former Editor in Chief of the New York Times Magazine Edward Klein has a new book that will be released tomorrow October 30th. In All Out War: The Plot to Destroy Trump, Klein reveals an FBI investigation proving coordination between American college campus far left radicals and Islamic terrorists from groups such as ISIS and Al Qaeda.

Buzzfeed opinion piece: After terror attack, let’s ban cars in cities
After every mass shooting incident, the left immediately calls for more gun control. That knee-jerk response has led some on the right to mockingly ask, after attacks like the one in Manhattan this week, whether we should now ban cars and trucks. Today Buzzfeed posted an opinion piece (by an outside contributor) who takes this line of thought and runs with it. Yes, the author says, we should ban cars and trucks, at least in cities.

Manafort indicted on 12 counts, surrenders to FBI
Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort is being charged with 12 counts, including conspiracy against the United States, in the first indictment to come from the investigation of special counsel Robert Mueller.

More students, young Americans turn to paganism
As millennials continue to leave traditional Christian religions, interest in Wiccan and pagan practices have seen increased interest in recent years, a trend also spotted among young people and on college campuses.

DNC Email: Straight White Men Need Not Apply
The Democratic National Committee is hiring for some new positions in their Technology Team, including Chief Security Officer, IT Systems Administrator, and Product Manager. In the email soliciting job applications, it says that the DNC is looking for a “staff of diverse voices and life experiences.”

Poll: Nearly Half Of Millennials Prefer Socialism To Capitalism
Nearly half of American millennials (44 percent) would rather live in a socialist society than a capitalist one, according to a report from the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation (VOC) which relied on YouGov polling data. Even so, there’s widespread ignorance among millennials about socialism and communism – only 71 percent of the millennials surveyed could properly identify what communism is and many often conflated the two economic systems.

Trump’s Rebuilding of the US Appeals Courts Continues
A couple of months ago I posted a story titled Despite Chaos Trump Is Reshaping The Federal Judiciary. In it I pointed out that while an unbelievable amount of energy is being focused on Donald Trump’s latest Twitter utterance, virtually no attention is being directed at his very successful campaign to stuff the federal judiciary with young, extremely intelligent and Federalist Society approved jurists.

A Traditional Marriage Student Group Has Been Branded a “Hate Group”
In today’s bitter political climate, there are few labels more intellectually lazy than “hate group.” When you label an entity as a “hate group,” you automatically demonize it and remove from your shoulders any mantle of responsibility to dialogue or engage in civil discourse with this denounced entity.

Students Offended by Play About How They’re Always Offended
There’s a really hilarious film that came out in the mid-90s called “PCU” – a double entendre acronym for “Port Chester University” and “Politically Correct University” – that is a must-watch for all college-age students if they want to understand the silliness of the social justice crusades they see swirling around them on campus.

Teacher Sues Public District to Stop it from Giving JW Antifa Activism Records
A Judicial Watch record request has fueled a tense legal drama between a middle school teacher who is a national organizer for a radical leftist group and the public district that employs her. The conflict ensued a few weeks ago when Judicial Watch filed a California Public Records Act (CPRA) request with the Berkeley Unified School District (BUSD) to obtain information about the controversial teacher’s violent Antifa activism.

Justice Department threatening to pull all of California’s grant money
Ever since Governor Jerry Brown signed into law the new declaration that all of California would henceforth be a sanctuary state where federal immigration officials would receive no help from local law enforcement in protecting citizens from illegal aliens, they’ve been running into problems. First, the state’s sheriffs began openly protesting the move, with some refusing to comply with the orders. And now, with enough budget woes already plaguing them, the Department of Justice is sounding as if they will make good on their previous promise and begin slashing some of the grant money they’re used to receiving from Washington.

Venezuela introduces 100,000 bolivar bill worth $2
The new note unveiled by President Nicolas Maduro is meant to curb out-of-control inflation that has left the country reeling. Just one year ago, a 100 bolivar bill was the largest amount of cash on the market.

Court: Usenet Provider is Not Liable for Piracy
After several years, the appeals court has reached a final decision in the case between anti-piracy group BREIN and Usenet provider NSE. The court ruled that the Usenet provider is not liable for the copyright infringements of its users. However, it also requires the service in question to offer a fast and “effective” takedown procedure.

Turkey: Erdogan’s Stalinist Purge
Perhaps even more objectionable is Turkey’s persecution of novelists who do not even take part in the political debate. They are hated by Erdogan’s Islamist government simply for conveying Western ideas and fighting for freedom of speech.

Catalan leader is said to have fled the country
Over the weekend we discussed what seemed more like the plot for a foreign intrigue novel than actual news out of Europe. Could Carles Puigdemont, the unemployed, former leader of Catalonia, actually make a run for it, leaving Spain to avoid possible jail time? That all depended on how dire the situation at home seemed and whether he might be facing charges which could land him in prison. And where would he go? The only offer on the table seemed to be coming from Belgium.

Calling the Cops in Europe? Don’t Bother
Are there no-go zones in Europe, or aren’t there? Have political control and the power of law enforcement in some urban neighborhoods been tacitly turned over to local Muslim leaders, with even the police taking a hands-off attitude? Across Europe, some politicians, journalists, and police spokespeople continue to deny that such zones exist, although the evidence for their existence becomes increasingly difficult to disavow.

Protests in Iran
Portions of the Iranian emigree community in the U.S. and France are buzzing about reports of protest activity in Iran. Some are relying on reports from family and friends in Iran; others on various news outlets.

Feminist Sharia? Poll Reveals Surprising Beliefs of Norwegian Muslims
In a recent poll, dubbed the largest and most comprehensive in Norway’s history, 97 percent of the Nordic country’s Muslims said they were fully in favor of equality between the sexes. However, roughly one third of the respondents claimed it was important to follow sharia, leaving analysts puzzled.

Maduro to investors: Who’s up for a bailout?
The trouble with socialism, Margaret Thatcher once observed, is that their governments “always run out of other people’s money.” What happens then? Why, they keep asking for other people’s money, of course! Venezuela has teetered on the edge of default for months, but its dictator Nicolas Maduro has a plan to resolve it. The plan is to ask everyone owed money by Venezuela not to worry about getting paid back.

Opinion

Where is the Zola of the Zulu?
Gee, thanks, guys. Your campus craziness has well and truly crossed the Atlantic. Last week, it was reported in the United Kingdom that 100 Cambridge University students had written to the authorities demanding that the English syllabus be “decolonized.”

George Papadopoulous Is Exhibit A for Why You Never Talk to the Cops
There is a classic video on YouTube of Regent University School of Law Professor James Duane explaining to a class why you have to be a moron to talk to the police. The punchline takes place about half-way through when he invites one of his students, a detective, to give his perspective on talking to the police.

The Manafort indictment
I can think of no one better than Andy McCarthy to evaluate the indictment of Paul Manafort. In McCarthy’s view, the indictment “is much ado about nothing . . . except as a vehicle to squeeze Manafort, which is special counsel Robert Mueller’s objective.”

Why American Liberal-Arts Colleges Ain’t What They Used to Be
Fifty years ago, a degree from almost any of America’s liberal-arts colleges meant something. It was pretty good evidence that the student had fairly well honed communication skills and had developed an analytical cast of mind. The degree demonstrated trainability and the refinement needed for most work.